Experimental Populations | Universal Life: Rethinking 20th-century Medicine, Public Health, and the Relation of Economy to Experiment in South Asia and beyond

Conference/Symposium | April 7 | 8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. | Stephens Hall, 10 (ISAS Conf. Room)

This day-long workshop brings together three leading global scholars of STS (science and technology studies) and the history of medicine to rethink the transformation of colonial medicine and the forms of life it specifies under decolonization and planned development. At stake is the remaking of morbidity, death, and tropical physiology, of the troubled relation of the local and the universal in the constitution of national and postcolonial techno-science, and of the shifting experimental and clinical grounding of “the West.”

Agenda

8:30-9:00
Registration and Coffee

9:00-10:25
Projit B Mukharji, University of Pennsyvania
Sojourner Physiology: Serotropicality and the Birth of the Neoliberal Subject
Discussant: Thomas Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley

10:30-12
Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto
Dying, Not Dying, and Not Being Born: Experimental Exuberance in Bangladesh
Discussant: Ian Whitmarsh, University of California San Francisco

1:15-2:45 
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Columbia University
Aging and Chronic Disease in the Tropics: Cancer, Age and Development in India and South Africa
Discussant: Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley

2:45-3:30
Final comments
Panelists with Nivedita Menon, Jawaharlal Nehru University

This conference, a part of our focus this semester on Public Health in South Asia, will bring together leading historians and science and technology studies scholars rethinking the position of South Asia within the entwined histories of medical and colonial modernity.

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